Adaptation Strategies of Citrus and Tomato Farmers Towards the Effect of Climate Change in Nigeria

Abstract

Climate change is a major challenge to agricultural development in Africa and the world at large. Agriculture, being one of the most weather-dependent of all human activities is highly vulnerable to climate change. Horticulture which is therefore an aspect of Agriculture is not an exemption. Farmers had to live with the realities of climate change and be able to manage the situation to maintain their enterprise. Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) structure was adopted to draw a sample of 441 horticultural farmers using multi-stage sampling technique. Four agricultural zones (Southeast, Southwest, Northeast and North central) were purposively selected due to prevalence in horticultural production. From each of these zones, one state each was randomly selected (Oyo, Imo, Gombe and Benue). ADP zones with high production of fruits and vegetables were purposively selected, 25 % of the blocks within the selected zones was randomly selected, 50 % cells within the selected blocks were randomly sampled and 10 % of the respondents from the generated list of fruits and vegetable producers, farmers group were randomly selected. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were used. Data for the study were analyzed using descriptive and statistics, and T-test at p = 0.05, Mean age of horticultural farmers was 46.0 years ±9.3, 83.9 % were male, and mean family size was 5.8. The modal class of number of years in horticultural production is between 10 and 20 years (41.1 %) with 87.8 % belonging to informal working exchange group. Fifty-six percent of the respondents have low adaptation strategy score. There is significant difference in the use adaptation strategies between (t = −3.391; p < 0.000) citrus and tomato farmers.